The Year Ahead in Crime and Justice

I’m spending New Year’s Day far away from it all, writing and reflecting on Orcas Island, off the coast of Washington State, and partaking in my favorite island activity: reading the local paper’s sheriff’s log. Over the years, I’ve gathered an impressive collection of clips from around the country, along the lines of “Charged in stabbing; Ceramic squirrel used as weapon; Upset over lack of beer.” There’s something engrossing about even the simplest, most haiku-like crime stories; we humans have an outsized appetite for the underbelly, and no morsel, it seems, is too small.

Admittedly, the crime stories most worth reflecting on from last year served up something heartier. Hanna Rosin’s “Murder by Craigslist,” published in The Atlantic last fall, is high on my list of crime reads from 2013. Rosin’s reporting began with a case that seemed destined to become mere tabloid fodder—the serial killings of men who answered online ads for a non-existent Ohio farmhand job—but delivered the reader something else entirely: the piece used the brutal murders as a chance to examine the increasingly precarious lives of working-class men whose economic safety nets have been snipped out from under them.

In a similar category I’d place Hamilton Morris’s masterfully bizarre tale about a magic-mushroom breeder’s death, for its trippy plot befitting a man who cared about mind travel.

For the sake of one last New Year’s list (a fixture Emily Nussbaum argues we should banish in 2014), I’ve zoomed out a few strata further, and have considered some of the criminal-justice themes and crime-related subplots that not only defined the past twelve months but look likely to mark the year ahead:

1. Tales of stopping stop-and-frisk. It’s hard to tell a single perfect story about a phenomenon as dispersed as stop-and-frisk; young people’s cell-phone footage has done as much to explain the program’s unpopularity as conventional works of journalism have. Still, Jennifer Gonnerman’s “Officer Serrano’s Hidden Camera,” in New York magazine, and “This American Life” ’s remarkable episode “The Right to Remain Silent” further back both came pretty close, featuring cops who covertly recorded how they were “told to write more tickets, do more stop-and-frisks, arrest more people for low level offenses that they might otherwise let go [to] get their numbers up.” And Jeffrey Toobin’s complex Profile in our own magazine of Shira Scheindlin, the federal judge who took on the policy in her approach to a major lawsuit, helped explain why the push to stop stop-and-frisk was one of the biggest stories of the year in New York, and beyond.

In 2014, who won’t be interested to watch how the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, follows up on his campaign promise to turn the tactic around? As the year closed, the plot took various twists: de Blasio’s choice of a police commissioner, William J. Bratton, who enthusiastically presided over the tactic’s use under Giuliani, in the nineties; then his pick of Zachary Carter as the city’s chief lawyer, a man who appears more in line with de Blasio’s proclaimed intentions on the issue. “We will start with our values,” de Blasio said on the eve of taking office. “We will drop the appeal on the stop-and-frisk case, because we think the judge was right about the reforms that we need to make.”

2. “Stand Your Ground” and the politics of vigilantism. First came the acquittal of George Zimmerman, in July, and the public outcry about what it means that a young black teen-ager, Trayvon Martin, could be left dead on the ground with no definitive basis for a conviction. (Obama’s words were memorable: “This could have been my son.”) As the year went on, we learned a new round of names: Renisha McBride and Jonathan Ferrell, in particular, both young black Americans seeking help in the dark from neighbors and winding up, instead, with lethal bullets in their bodies. As a result, 2014 will bring more trials, like Zimmerman’s, with racial subtexts.

It will also bring a re-trial for Marissa Alexander, a Florida woman who allegedly fired a warning shot into the air when her abusive husband had her cornered; though Alexander, like Zimmerman, invoked the state’s “Stand Your Ground” defense, she wound up with a twenty-year prison sentence. Alexander’s case was brought to light by voices far from the establishment, mostly on Twitter and other social-media platforms. Not long after, she won the right to a second trial and a release on bail, a reminder that 2013 was the year in which those with apps and anger could, in part, set the agenda.

3. The shadowy commerce of the Internet. Over the past year, many of the crime stories that stuck were the ones that exposed the seedy, inescapable black markets and dark webs to which the Internet has given rise. It’s no longer just Viagra pushers and Gambian princes seeking our banking details. Now, in the age of Snowden, we’re aware that the N.S.A. is collecting our metadata, while inhabitants of Silk Road’s empire are allegedly out to sell our neighbors every imaginable sort of snortable and combustible in the name of “freedom over tyranny.”

But the most disturbing of last year’s Internet crime tales was Megan Twohey’s adoption investigation for Reuters, “The Child Exchange.” Twohey’s reporting uncovered an active underground market on the Web where adoptive parents give away their troubled kids to ill-vetted strangers; the abuses that await young and vulnerable adoptees reveal the ease with which “children brought to America can be abruptly discarded and recycled.”

4. The war on “the war on drugs.” The year 2013 will likely be remembered among the “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” crowd as the year Washington State and Colorado prepared for marijuana’s legalization. It’s a policy experiment that reflects a broader national trend: a possible détente regarding the drug war that’s cost America billions, both socially and economically. In practice, implementation turns out to be a tricky beast, as Patrick Radden Keefe captured in his piece for The New Yorker on Washington State’s policy buzzkill. Elsewhere in the country, the law doesn’t always move as quickly as the hive mind. To see the growing rift, look no further than new stats showing that three thousand two hundred and seventy-eight prisoners are currently serving life without parole for non-violent crimes, often drug offenses.

For more on this last point, check out two reports that came out at the end of 2013. First, from the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, came a survey showing that eighty-one per cent of Texas Republicans favor sending non-violent drug offenders to treatment instead of prison. Equally challenging is the A.C.L.U.’s “A Living Death: Life Without Parole for Nonviolent Offenses,” a massive report highlighting some of the stories of men and women spending their lives in prison—one for the theft of a hundred-and-fifty-nine-dollar jacket, another for serving as the middleman in a ten-dollar marijuana sale. With Obama commuting the sentences of several life-without-parole inmates last month—a small fraction of the estimated total, but still, a real gesture—both parties seem up for questioning current drug policy in the year to come.

5. The ninth life of the gun-death epidemic. In the terrible hush that followed Newtown, Eli Saslow wrote movingly about the parents left behind—Mark and Jackie Barden, in particular, whose seven-year-old son, Daniel, died in the shootings. Saslow’s reporting allowed us to know something about the child, a boy whose glossy photo showed him smiling, “arms wrapped around Ninja Cat, the stuffed animal that had traveled with him everywhere, including into the hearse and underground.” More so, the story followed Mark and Jackie Barden into the dark parts of their grief, and their push for gun reform, to find out what happens “after the gunfire, the funerals, the NRA protests and the congressional debates.” To encounter even a small sliver of their journey in print is to feel the crush of that lonely quiet, and the hope so many families carry that some other sound will make itself known in 2014.

Photograph: Nina Berman/Noor/Redux

Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a visiting scholar at the N.Y.U. Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.